Shroud of Turin Ohio State University Villarreal Lecture Part 1 of 5 (Above)

Shroud of Turin Ohio State University Villarreal Lecture Part 2 of 5

Shroud of Turin Ohio State University Villarreal Lecture Part 4 of 5

A trinity of priests praying for a miracle? These three priests clutching the Turin Shroud are none other than the three favourites for Westminster, Archbishops Vincent Nichols and Peter Smith, and Bishop Malcolm McMahon, from Birmingham, Cardiff and Nottingham.

. . . Which one of the three will the Shroud favour? Sadly, perhaps, none, as the shroud pictured here is a replica, albeit one of just six in the world, currently on display at an exhibition in Birmingham. Read the full report at Times online faith by the spokesman for the Newman Cause, Peter Jennings.

Full posting: Ruth Gledhill - Times Online - WBLG: Dolan for New York - Westminster next

Cross posted from A Blogspotting Anglican Episcopalian

The theory is ludicrous. As one commenter wrote:

Allen's hypothesis is sheer nonsense. It has so many holes you could drive a truck through it, starting with how do you get back to back images on his hypothesis. Moreover, just try to get the cloth to body distance 3D effect using his mechanism? It won't work and then you have the problem of registry of the blood and image since the blood went on before the image.

Here is the article:

AN international television documentary on the controversial Shroud of Turin, which has just been completed, features the work of a Nelson Mandela Bay academic who has been researching the ancient relic for more than a decade.

The Shroud is purported to be the cloth in which the body of Jesus Christ was buried.

Professor Nicholas Allen‘s research resulted in a book in which he explained how the shroud, which appears to carry the imprinted form of Christ, was actually “the first photograph”.

Pioneer Studios from Hammersmith in London filmed the documentary on the mystery behind one of the Catholic Church‘s most important relics, and it will be aired by the Discovery Channel.

The Shroud of Turin was proved to be a 13th or 14th century forgery by carbon dating techniques in 1988 – but that scientific conclusion hasn‘t altogether dispelled the firm belief among many Christians that it is a holy relic.

Allen, formerly dean of the faculty of arts and design at the then Port Elizabeth Technikon, is a sculptor and art historian.

“The documentary is intended to offer a more balanced appraisal of the Shroud‘s import. Apparently another recent documentary was aired in the USA and gave the impression that the shroud was a miracle, so the Discovery Channel decided to commission Pioneer Studios to make a more objective documentary to counter this,” said Allen.

A number of researchers and historians were interviewed for the documentary, mostly Americans.

“I was asked to reconstruct my own experiments from the early 1990s and was also interviewed. My interview took place in the UK at a venue just outside Oxford. For this, I reconstructed a camera obscura, a screen for suspending the shroud and a gibbet for suspending a fibre-glass corpse.”

Allen started his research on the Shroud of Turin out of a passion for history and out of curiosity.

He said he chose his avenue of research because “nobody was looking at how a forgery was made. I started to find out how they did it.

“I started to look at it as a phenomenon and the obvious conclusion it was a photograph.

“Most of my research was based on published work by other researchers. I saw the Shroud of Turin for the first time at the new Millennium exhibition in 2000 in Italy.”

Allen‘s research was published as a thesis, and later in 1998, he published a book The Turin Shroud and the Crystal Lens: Testament to a Lost Technology.

Allen believes the Shroud of Turin is physical evidence that people understood at least the rudiments of primitive photography about five centuries before its accepted discovery in 1799 by Thomas Wedgewood.

In 1988, carbon dating was done by three institutions which came up with exactly the same conclusion that the linen of the shroud was grown between 1260 and 1390.

BUTLER - It is not a book for the squeamish.

But it is a book for those who want to understand fully and exactly, from the perspective of a medical professional, what Jesus Christ gave to humankind through his passion and death.

Dr. Gerard Stanley Sr. was a resident in family practice in the early 1980s when he read Dr. William Edwards' paper, "On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ," in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The paper moved him both as a physician and as a Catholic - what could possibly lead Jesus to suffer some of the most brutal torture any human being could possibly suffer unless he loved us enough to die horribly for us?

For years, Dr. Stanley, now in practice in Butler where he is a member of St. Patrick Parish, would lecture on the passion and death of Jesus to small groups. Finally, at the urging of friends, he put his years of research and knowledge into a book.

"He Was Crucified," subtitled "Reflections of the Passion of Christ," was published in January by Concordia Publishing House. It is available at the I. Donnelly Co., 6601 Troost in Kansas City; from the publisher at 1-800-325-3040 or online at www.cph.org, or through online retailers such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

"I have a PhD in theology," said his pastor, Father John Bolderson who got the first copy off the press in January. "This is as scholarly a presentation on the crucifixion as I have ever read anywhere."

Stanley said it was a book that he had to write.

"How could I not write it," he said. "That became the question."

Far from a gory rehash, Dr. Stanley writes with precision and plain simple language as he breaks the death of Jesus into four phases - the weakening of his body during the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, the horrendous scourging at the pillar, the carrying of the cross to Golgotha, and finally, his agonizing death on the cross.

"Every time I reflect on Jesus' passion, I grow in my appreciation for what my Savior endured for me and my sins," Stanley wrote in his introduction. "If you receive insight into Christ's suffering, then this book has accomplished its purpose.

The book is filled with art from ancient to modern that depicts Jesus' suffering. It is also filled with Scripture, hymns and reflections from great thinkers ranging from Cyril of Alexandria to Martin Luther that were added by the book's editor, Dr. Kent J. Burreson who sits on the faculty of Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis.

It is a book, Stanley told The Catholic Key, that is not meant to be read and put aside.

"How do you not help spread the word to help shed light on what Jesus went through for us?" he said.

Stanley said even depictions of Jesus nailed to the cross don't fully reflect the agony he suffered.

"We always give Jesus a nice clean body, but that's not what happened," he said. "I guess if that helps us relax and gives us a chance to meditate, then it's a good thing."

But understanding the fullness of Jesus' suffering is also important, he said.

"It's hard to imagine how people could be so cruel to another human being," he said. "We wouldn't allow this to happen to an animal."

Stanley said that Edwards' original paper was written to debunk a short-lived heresy floating around at the time that Jesus death was faked and that he was resuscitated, not resurrected, a few days later.

But even today, not even with the tools of modern medical technology, could Jesus have survived what he experienced, Stanley said.

Stanley said he paid particular attention to Gethsemane because that is an important, yet overlooked, part of the passion story.

He pointed to the Gospel of Luke, the physician, who described Jesus sweating profusely, his sweat "like great drops of blood."

That is a medical condition called hemohidrosis, a phenomenon so rare that no observer could imagine it, Stanley said.

Stanley said the same profuse sweating under intense agony was recorded in the horrific experiments that Nazis performed on concentration camp prisoners.

"You ask yourself, what could have been so intense that could have caused this?" Stanley said.

"It begs the question: Did Jesus in his final few hours in the garden actually experience what was about to happen?"

Stanley said that in his three hours in the garden, Jesus fully experienced everything that was about to happen to him. He went through every stage of grief - denial and the final temptation of the serpent, bargaining with God the Father to remove the burden from him, then finally, with the assistance of an angel sent to strengthen him, acceptance.

But by that time, after three hours, the profuse sweating of blood had taken its toll on Jesus' body, leaving him profoundly weakened, Stanley said.

"He surrendered himself with complete understanding of what was going to happen," he said.

Following his arrest, Jesus was beaten, tortured and shuttled back and forth between the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and Jewish authorities who could not, by Roman law, execute Jesus themselves.

Pilate actually wanted Jesus alive, Stanley noted.

"Jesus was a disruptive force to the Jewish hierarchy, and anything that was disruptive to the Jewish hierarch was welcomed by Pilate," he said.

But the Jewish leaders who wanted Jesus dead prevailed by telling Pilate that Jesus claimed to be the "King of the Jews."

"That's what got him," Stanley said. "Jesus' claim that he was a 'god' would not have been offensive to Pilate. But Pilate didn't want the word getting back to Rome that he had spared a threat to Rome."

Pilate ordered Jesus scourged and crucified.

The scourging alone was fatal, especially to a man in Jesus' weakened condition from Gethsemane, Stanley said.

"That was the routine procedure. The condemned were to be scourged before being put on the cross, but they were to die on the cross," he said.

Roman scourging caused more than pain, he said. Attached to the whips they used were barbs that ripped off flesh, muscle and even bone. Using the Shroud of Turin as evidence of what a victim of scourging endured, Stanley said that Jesus endured well over 100 strokes.

"His flesh and muscle was literally ripped off," Stanley said. "His back, neck, arms, buttocks, anywhere a whip would have hit, was ripped open. Think of the hatred the Romans must have had: 'Here is your king. We will beat him.' They beat him so severely that he died rapidly on the cross."

But not that rapidly. After crowning him with thorns and opening gashes on his head, the Romans nailed him to the cross with a precision they learned over decades of crucifying their enemies.

They were very careful to place the nails in the wrists and ankles that would hold up the weight of a man, yet not rupture vital blood vessels and cause quick death.

The crucifixion was all about pain, Stanley said.

"Now think back to the Garden of Gethsemane," he said. "Is that enough to ask your Father to take it away?"

Bleeding and in anguish from the brutal scourging, the crown of thorns digging dozens of new wounds into his head, Jesus heaved and gasped for every breath he took, his open wounds scraping the rough cross for three solid hours.

His internal organs began to fail, Stanley said. His lungs could not exchange oxygen, and carbon dioxide began to build up. His kidneys began to quit. His heart was ready to burst. Any one of a number of causes, including loss of blood and body fluid, was enough to kill.

When the Roman centurion delivered the "death thrust" into Jesus side, puncturing his heart, it wasn't to kill him, but to make certain he was dead, Stanley said.

Stanley admitted that as a physician, Jesus' death was horrifying. But the story does not end there. In his final chapter, Stanley reflects on the triumph over death of the resurrection.

It is that miracle of the promise of eternal life that Stanley has also witnessed in his patients as they are facing death.

"Part of our job as physicians when we can't change the outcome is to make patients as comfortable as possible as they die," he said.

"They go through it all. First you ask your saints and God the Father for help, then you see that Jesus went through the same thing," Stanley said.

"Knowing Jesus went through this and more, there is a comfort there," he said. "They can then die with a peacefulness that you can see. It is just remarkable."

Stanley will give a presentation on the suffering of Jesus following the 10 a.m. Mass Feb. 22 at St. Patrick Parish, 400 W. Nursery St., Butler, where he will also sign his book.

The following Sunday at 6 p.m. the parish will host a screening of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ."

The Catholic Key: Online Edition Newspaper of the Diocese of Kansas City - St.Joseph

A free exhibition on the Turin Shroud, the image believed to be the burial cloth of Jesus, will be held in Birmingham for week from this Saturday (Feb 21st) until next (Feb 28)

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols is recommending a visit to The Cross, The Resurrection and the Shroud of Turin as “an excellent way to begin” Lent.

He said the exhibition, which he had visited in Little Aston in September helped visitors “enter more deeply into the sufferings of Our Lord.”

The Archbishop added: “I am delighted that this remarkable exhibition is coming to St Chad’s Cathedral.”

It has been put together by Pam Moon, lay minister at St Peter’s Anglican Church, Little Aston in the Diocese of Lichfield, where her husband, the Rev Phil Moon is vicar.

Full story: Free Turin Shroud exhibition to open in Birmingham -Times Online. Sourced for cross posting from A Blogspotting Anglican Episcopalian

This Shroud of Turin documentary was first shown in December and received numerous positive reviews. Part of it was recorded at Ohio State University during a conference of about 100 scientists, historians and other researchers last August.

Discovery is featuring the broadcast on their home page and that is warranted. In my opinion, it is the best documentary ever made about the shroud, even better than the 2002 PBS special. Watch it!

It clearly explains why the previous carbon dating has been shown to be invalid by peer-reviewed scientific studies including the work of Raymond Roger and subsequently a team of nine scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

If you have wondered about the shroud, this is an excellent production. Even if you are skeptical, it will help explain why many people believe it is genuine or are at least open to the possibility that it is.

Source: Unwrapping the Shroud: New Evidence to be Rebroadcast on the Discovery Channel

Bloodstained Shroud of Turin, New Mexico, 1980
Photograph by Victor R. Boswell, Jr.

This computer-enhanced image, created in New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory, shows bloodstained areas on the Shroud of Turin. This relic’s fame comes from the imprint of a life-size, bearded man on the linen cloth. The shroud also contains traces of blood and marks consistent with scourging and crucifixion. While some believe this cloth covered Jesus at the time of his burial, the shroud’s origins and authenticity remain a source of controversy.

National Geographic: Photo of the Day: 11/06/08

"The kindness of a stranger," writes the Crunchy Con:

You want to see what it means to love one's neighbor? Marilyn Mock, who lives in the Dallas suburb of Rockwall, went to a foreclosure auction with her grown son last weekend to be with him as he purchased his first house. While there, she saw a woman sitting at the edge of the auction hall, sobbing. It was Tracy Orr, a housekeeper who was there to watch her humble house sold off to the highest bidder.

Marilyn couldn't stand it. She bought Tracy's house, sight unseen, and told her to move back home. Now Tracy will be paying her mortgage to Marilyn, not to the bank. If you go to the story, be sure to watch the video report from the scene. Tracy, through tears, says nobody's ever done anything like that for her before. And Marilyn is not a wealthy woman, it seems from the story.

More from CNN:

Mock says she's using one of her business dump trucks as collateral for the $30,000 sale price. "I can't afford to just give [the house] to her," she says.

As for Orr's payments, Mock says, "We'll just figure out however much she can pay on it. That way, she can have her house back."

Why be so generous?

"She was just so sad. You put yourself in their situation and you realize you just got to do something," says Mock, who says she has trouble walking by homeless people on the street and not helping them out.

"If it was you, you'd want somebody to stop and help you."

When she told her husband of 30 years that she'd just bought a home for a stranger, she says his reaction was: "Whatever."

"He's used to it," she says with a booming laugh.

Incredible. May we all have the love in our hearts that Marilyn Mock does. I am reminded of something Mother Teresa said:

At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done. We will be judged by "I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless, and you took me in." Hungry not only for bread -- but hungry for love. Naked not only for clothing -- but naked of human dignity and respect. Homeless not only for want of a home of bricks --but homeless because of rejection.

Marilyn Mock gave Tracy Orr her home back. But as Tracy told the Dallas Morning News:

"More than my house, she gave me something inside, and that's more important than material or financial things."

The crisis breaking upon us gives all of us an opportunity to be kind to our neighbors. Few of us will have the resources, I'd wager, to do what Marilyn Mock did. But if she can do that, how much can we manage to do for those in need?

Over at Wigderson Library & Pub: Evidence and faith:

Those interested in the debate surrounding the Shroud of Turin will be interested in the Shroud of Turin Blog.

Scientifically, we don't know the age of the Shroud of Turin. However, we do know it is at least twice as old as the now discredited carbon 14 date. As for the images, we have no idea how they are formed. But they were not made by any known artistic method.

The Atheist, the skeptic, the rationalist must accept the scientific facts just as any Christian should. To deny that the shroud is authentic requires a leap of faith. So does affirmation. But the evidence suggests that it is a late-Second Temple era burial shroud of a crucifixion victim. From that, much can be inferred.

We are in awe of that which cannot be explained except by accepting the miracle before us, regardless of its origin. The Shroud will be on display to the public in Turin in 2010.

Shroud of Turin Blog nails it with Ridiculous ‘Shroud is fake’ article at Suite101.com

An absolutely ridiculous article appears at Suite101.com. The title is “The Shroud of Turin Debunked: A Forged Christian Relic.” There are two clues: 1) It cites a piece from a 2004 issue of Skeptical Inquirer which accused Public Broadcasting System (PBS) of burying the truth about the shroud and 2) it deals only with selective evidence.

Resting in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy is a fourteen-foot-long linen cloth whose long history has been rife with controversy. Though believers in the shroud’s authenticity are undeterred by skeptics’ arguments, the bulk of the evidence indicates that the shroud is certainly a medieval forgery.

Well, let’s look at that evidence:

Biblical and Historical Evidence

Joe Nickell, in an article from the July/August 2004 issue of Skeptical Inquirer entitled “PBS ‘Secrets of the Dead’ Buries the Truth About Turin Shroud,” points out several facts that call the shroud’s authenticity into doubt. First of all, the Bible itself, specifically the Gospel of John, explicitly states that the crucified body of Jesus was wrapped in several cloths, including a separate cloth covering the face.

That is true, but totally irrelevant. Because there were several cloths, according to the Gospel of John, does not in any way rule out that one of those cloths might have been saved. There is no logic to such a statement. Moreover, this is selective use of gospel narrative by someone who also, elsewhere, debunks biblical narratives.

Second, the figure of Jesus on the shroud conforms to artistic representations of him from the fourteenth century; the body is elongated, as was common in Gothic art, and bears a striking resemblance to other depictions of Christ from that period.

Actually, that is a real stretch. The visual arts (paintings and sketches) of that period were very primitive and lacked anatomical precision found in the shroud. Moreover, at the time no artists would have painted the hand wounds in the wrists (they were always in the palms) or painted the body naked.

Third, and most damningly, there is no mention of the shroud in historical records at all until 1389. In that year, in a report to Pope Clement IV, a bishop openly admits the shroud was “cunningly painted” to perpetrate a “fraud” involving “pretended miracles.”

By the way, not 1389 but 1349.

Good grief! Most artifacts from antiquity lack written records that go back to their provenance. And as historians and archeologists well know, there are always gaps in records. In fact, there is a drawing of a shroud from 1192 in the Pray Codex found in the Budapest Museum (nearly a century earlier than the earliest carbon 14 date) that is clearly identifiable from particular features as the current Shroud of Turin. It is well known that a cloth with an image believed to be of Jesus existed in Edessa as documented by Eusebius of Caesarea in the early 4th century. According to Eusebius (and this must be considered legend) the cloth was brought to Edessa by the apostle Thomas or the disciple Thadeus. In 544 a cloth with an image thought to be of Jesus was found concealed above a gate in the city walls of Edessa. That cloth was transferred to Constantinople on August 14, 944. It was, at that time, described as a full-length burial cloth with an image of Jesus and bloodstains.

In 1204, following the sacking of Constantinople, it became the property of Othon de la Roche, the French Duke of Athens and Thebes. He sent it to his home in the town of Besançon, France in 1207. At Eastertide, it was removed from his castle and displayed in the Besançon Cathedral until the cathedral was destroyed by fire in March of 1349. Any records that might have existed may have been burned in that fire as all church records were destroyed (not an uncommon problem for historians). In that same year, Geoffroy de Charny, a French knight married Jeanne de Vergy, a grand-niece of Othon de la Roche, and delivered a/the shroud to the canons of Lirey, thereby creating the earliest extant record in Western Europe.

As for the memorandum of Pierre d’Arcis, the Bishop of Troyes, the letter is a draft piece and is believed by historians to refer to a painting that was made of the shroud and not the shroud, itself.

General Physical Evidence

The figure of Jesus has other unusual properties. For one thing, the image is not distorted, as it would be if it were the impression of a three-dimensional body wrapped in cloth; one has only to smear a napkin with mustard and press it against one’s face to see that the resulting two-dimensional image looks nothing like the figure on the shroud.

Actually, that presumes that the image is a contact image. Given that no one knows how the image was formed, the statement is not helpful. In fact, no one believes that the image is a contact image.

Christ’s hair hangs downward, like that of a standing person, and the suspiciously bright red “blood” on the shroud appears to be painted on top of the hair rather than saturated within it.

Image analysis shows that the hair does not hang down. There are two dark bands on each side of the face (that are not part of the face but run upward and downward beyond the face) and these create something of an optical illusion of hair hanging down. Nickell knows this but chooses to ignore it.

In addition, the cloth itself is a 3:1 herringbone twill, of which no examples have been found from the first century, when the shroud was supposed to have originated.

No have any sample of 3 over 1 herringbone twill been found in the medieval era.

Scientific Tests

Pieces of the shroud were carbon-dated in 1987 by three separate laboratories. All three — at Oxford, Zurich, and the University of Arizona — produced a date of origin circa 1260–1390, which is consistent with the time the shroud turned up in the historical record.

Actually the correct date is 1988, not 1987. All three labs ran the same tests on pieces of a single sample. No, all three labs did not arrive at the same date range. That is a statistical combination of the results from the three labs.

However, tests recently conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory by a team of nine scientists under the direction of Robert Villarreal confirm what chemist Raymond Rogers found and published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Thermochimica Acta (Jan. 2005): The tested sample was not representative of the shroud’s cloth. Rogers’ findings had also been confirmed by Georgia Tech’s materials forensic chemist John L. Brown.

This is part of the problem in basing an article mostly on a single 2004 article. Research would have reveal this.

Tests of the “blood” were carried out by microanalyst Walter McCrone over a period of years, and the findings were consistent with the image being created with tempera paint.

Actually that statement is completely false. Walter McCrone did conclude that the bloodstains, and indeed the images, were painted, but it was not over a period of years. He wrote his conclusion in the same year that he carried out his microscopic inspection of fibers taken from the shroud.

However, Mark Anderson, who worked for McCrone, examined the fibers using laser microprobe Raman spectrometry and found that what McCrone thought was (inorganic) paint was in fact an organic substance. Previously, the shroud (and not just fibers) had been observed with visible and ultraviolet spectrometry, infrared spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, and thermography. No paint was found. Later, pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry tests conducted at the Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence at the University of Nebraska, on fibers examined by McCrone, were unable to detect any paint particles or painting medium.

Moreover, immunological, fluorescence and spectrographic tests, as well as Rh and ABO typing of blood antigens, reveal that the stains are human blood.  Many of the bloodstains have the distinctive forensic signature of clotting with red corpuscles about the edge of a clot with a clear yellowish halo of serum. The heme was converted into its parent porphyrin, and the spectra examined. The bloodstains are blood. Microchemical tests for proteins were positive in blood areas. Much of this work is published in peer reviewed scientific journals including Archeological Chemistry: Organic, Inorganic, and Biochemical Analysis (American Chemical Society), Applied Optics and the Canadian Society of Forensic Sciences Journal.

Now, here we get slightly more current.

There has been enormous controversy over the scientific testing, with some authenticity advocates like the late Ray Rogers (writing in the May/June 2005 issue of Skeptical Inquirer) insisting that the carbon dating samples were contaminated. However, in light of the mountain of evidence pointing to forgery, and considering the fact that at least one modern artist has produced a comparable fake, it seems clear that the shroud, while a splendid artistic object, is nonetheless not the burial shroud of a savior that its believers wish it to be.

Actually, it is much more than Rogers. It is Brown and Villarreal and his team and Benford and Marino, etc. A good set of references for a current, carefully researched article would include material published in 2008.

• Peer reviewed scientific journal: Chemistry Today (Vol 26, Num 4, Jul/Aug 2008), “Discrepancies in the radiocarbon dating area of the Turin shroud”,  Benford M.S., Marino J.G.
• Peer-reviewed conference paper (Aug 2008), “Analytical Results on Thread Samples Taken from the Raes Sampling Area (Corner) of the Shroud Cloth” Robert Villarreal (Paper and video presentation awaiting publication, see Ohio State University Shroud of Turin Conference Press Release)
• Peer reviewed scientific journal: Thermochimica Acta (Vol 425, Jan 2005) “Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin”, Rogers, R.N.

You don’t need to believe it is real or that it is fake. But you have to do the research and use real facts in writing an article such as this.